About Leon Dabo

The serene Tonalist nocturnes of Leon Dabo were a sensation in the turn-of-the-century art world; his decorative and spiritual abstractions of riverbank views with vaulting azure clouds became icons of the era. Of French extraction, Dabo’s father had early come under the influence of James Abbott McNeill Whistler, as did his son with his modulated bird’s-eye depictions of the Hudson River. Dabo was included in the Armory Show of 1913. As the great critic Sadakichi Hartman put it: “The highest quality in Dabo’s work is the result of inner, not outer vision, denoting less the painter’s eye for difference than the seer’s eye for the analogy of pictorial and psychological phenomena….” Over his long and productive career Dabo painted a wide range of landscapes and still lifes. The New York Times called Dabo’s work a uniquely American style of art: “…those dreamers of fine dreams who abstract from the concrete facts of every-day life somewhat of its poetry, something of its ineffable beauty and elusive mystery…who render up the intimate and evasive spirit of things.”